430 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY 



Much of the final zoological work of his life lay with 

 the Bony Fishes, and he leaves unfinished (indeed only 

 just commenced) a memoir embodying a new scheme of 

 classification of these, which shows that he was intending 

 to do for them what he did for Birds in the most active 

 period of his career. It was my good fortune to have 

 helped as a hodman in the study of these creatures, with 

 a view to a Text-book we were to have written con- 

 jointly, and as I realise what he was intending to make 

 out of the dry facts, I am filled with grief at the thought 

 of what we must have lost. His classification was based 

 on the labours of years, as testified by a vast accumu- 

 lation of rough notes and sketches, and as a conspicuous 

 feature of it there stands the embodiment under one head 

 of all those fishes having the swim-bladder in connection 

 with the auditory organ by means of a chain of ossicles — 

 a revolutionary arrangement, which latei', in the hands 

 of the late Dr. Sagemahl, and by his introduction of the 

 famous term — " Ostariophyseae," has done more than all 

 else of recent years to clear the Ichthyological air. Your 

 father had anticipated this unpublished, and in a proposal 

 to unite the Herrings and Pikes into a single group, the 

 " Clupesoces," he had further given promise of a new 

 system, based on the study of the structure of the fins, 

 jaws, and reproductive organs of the Bony Fishes, the 

 classifications of which are still largely chaotic, which 

 would have been as revolutionary as it was rational. 

 New terms both in taxonomy and anatomy were contem- 

 plated, and in part framed. His published terms 

 " Elasmo- " and " Cysto-arian " are the adjective form of 

 two — far-reaching and significant — which give an idea of 

 what was to have come. Similarly, the spinose fin-rays 

 were to have been termed " acanthonemes," the branching 

 and multiarticulate " arthronemes," and those of the more 

 elementary and "adipose fin" type "protonemes" : and 

 had he lived to complete the task, I question whether 

 it would not have excelled his earlier achievements. 



